[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by Utah Bob

Not worth a response.

With utmost respect, I disagree. I find attacks upon professions vital to everyday life problematic, especially those directed at professionals in the armed services. While this particular commentary is directed at the British army, it indirectly assails the American army as well. IMO, such attacks, if left unchallanged, can have devastating historical consequences. An example from our own past illustrates my point.

During the Gilded Age, the U.S. Army was regularly subjected to these types of broadsides in what we now call the "MSM." In 1868, the Independent averred that the likelihood of “a respectable American citizen” joining the regular army was less “than [if] he would volunteer for the penitentiary.” Nine years later, the New York Sun described the army as a collection of “bummers, loafers, and foreign paupers.” In 1887, the New York Herald suggested that the army, a pack of “poor shiftless waifs” who had enlisted out of desperation, could not provide adequate national defense.*

These types of attacks had a significant, if not decisive, impact on military reformers' collective ability

1. to communicate that the military effectiveness of army was deteriorating throughout the Gilded Age,
2. to articulate why reform was necessary despite the fact that there was no strategically significant foreign threat to America itself, or
3. to respond to American navalists who sought to promote the navy directly at the army's expense.

An example of the first dynamic listed above can be found in a 1869 article in the New York Times. This article discussed a report by General W.T. Sherman that was a part of the secretary of war's annual report to Congress. The article primarily focused on the reduction of the army's personnel that followed the American Civil War. The article stated that the reduction required a “delicacy of management,” and had been achieved “without the slightest difficulty or embarrassment.” The piece concluded:

And it has been done, too, so effectually that, as General Sherman shows, “we have not a single regiment that may be said to be in reserve.” We have reached, think our officers, the limit of wise and prudent reductions considering the vast extent of the country and its present condition.**

However, if reads General Sherman's report, one quickly realizes that it was a document written by a professional soldier to warn civilians that the army was in bad decline. Yet, because the media had placed themselves as the interpreter of contemporaneous military affairs, the message was not only missed, but distorted so that it became the opposite of what General Sherman wrote.***

By my reading, it was not until 1939, when General George C. Marshall sat before congress as the army's chief of staff during numerous rounds of testimony that American civilians began to re-align their views of professional soldiers.

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* These quotes are from Jack D. Foner, The United States Soldier Between Two Wars: Army Life and Reforms, 1865-1898 (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 74.
** "Our Army in Time of Peace," New York Times, 7 December 1869, p. 6.
*** William T. Sherman, “Report of the General of the Army, 20 November 1869,” as attached to U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Report of the Secretary of War, Being Part of the Messages and Documents Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Second Session of the Forty-First Congress, Volume I, House of Representatives Executive Document 1, pt. 2, Forty-First Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1869), as printed in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives During the Second Session of the Forty-First Congress, 1869-’70, Volume II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870).
**** Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations [The United States Army in World War II: The War Department] (1950; reprint, Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History, 1985), pp. 8, 15-56.